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Last updated: 2:09 pm
September 2, 2008
Posted: 4:18 am
September 2, 2008
HOW many plot twists can you fit on the head of a pin?
If you're Shawn Ryan and the rest of the producers of "The Shield," the answer is quite a lot.
It's a gross understatement to say the plot thickens in the final season of "The Shield." In the first eight episodes FX provided for preview (out of 13), the plot takes so many twists and turns that it doesn't just thicken, it solidifies. You wonder if you'll ever find your way out of it.
More to the point, there doesn't seem to be any way out for this show's violence-prone antiheroes, the corrupt, plainclothes cops of a gangbusting "strike team" working out of the most decrepit precinct house in Los Angeles.
As the seventh and final season of "The Shield" gets underway, all the bad stuff they've ever been involved with (including the murder of a fellow cop in the very first episode) is coming home to roost, while, at the same time, a host of new problems arise to pile up on the old ones.
If you don't know them by now, this is your last chance to get to know Dets. Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis), Shane Vendrell (Walton Goggins) and Ronnie Gardocki (David Rees Snell), not to mention the other cops and characters who populate a neighborhood that might be the shabbiest hellhole in all of LA, if not the world.
"The Shield" remains the grittiest cop show that has probably ever been made. It is relentlessly violent and easily the most profane TV show ever produced for advertiser-supported television.
In fact, the dirty talk seems so gratuitous and overdone in this final season that it is liable to repel some viewers, especially those not already accustomed to this show's hard edges.
For that matter, some of the plot complications come across as contrived and, at best, barely plausible.
So if the show is flawed, why award it our highest rating of four stars? Because despite a few reservations, I find this show impossible to resist and find myself watching episode after episode whenever FX sends another bundle of them.
And just when I think the show is not as daring as it once was, they spring a storyline on me such as the one coming up in Episode Five in which precinct Capt. Claudette Wims (the incomparable CCH Pounder) confronts a child gangbanger in an interrogation room and they engage in a nasty set-to about the meaning of the N-word that made my hair stand on end.
For better or worse, "The Shield" set the standard for what is now permissible on basic cable. It's one of those shows I can't imagine living without.
"The Shield: Final Act" Tonight at 10 on FX
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